Gungor and the Liturgists at first glance speak my language. When I read the Liturgists manifesto I feel my self saying right on. Gungor’s and the Liturgists’ talk about liturgy and beauty I get and love . My problem – Gungor’s music never really spoke to me (a song here and there I may like but just not my thing). The Liturgists liturgies either feel like modules that plug into some other contraption I don’t own, or are nonsense, I don’t know which. Each time I’ve attempted to engage the work of Gungor and the Liturgists I’d see something that in terms general outline and broad brushstrokes I should get, and yet there is always only frustration. I certainly don’t deny that their work is worshipful or meditative, but it remains a puzzle and entirely inaccessible to me.

Then, I came across Phil Kline’s John the Revelator Mass and the first hearing blew me away. From the first listen I knew I needed to find away to use the mass as an actual liturgy (which this review found difficult to imagine, I have no difficulty imagining it). My response to Phil Kline’s mass only deepened my puzzlement over my lack of enthusiasm for what Gungor and the Liturgists are doing. Phil Kline while having been raised Lutheran doesn’t make any claim to be a Christian, though a spiritual person, writes a mass that not only I like musically but that is comprehensible to me liturgically as worship, such that I intend to use it as an actually liturgy on the feast of St John the Evangelist (hopefully this year). While the Liturgists’ liturgies to me are just nice art pieces that I can appreciate or critique, and may grab me as private meditative pieces (but I don’t particularly need a liturgy to meditate, nor do feel the need for group meditation) but can’t imagine how one would use them as actual liturgies with physical actions and movement within a worship service.

Some clarity came as I read Phil Kline’s description of his approach to the mass . When he was commissioned to write the mass he began with the Blues song John the Revelator (thus the name of the mass as opposed Mass of St John the Evangelist). But this didn’t lead him to create a Blues mass ( and that makes all the sense in the world to me) Kline stuck with the basic structure of the mass, the ordinary, including choosing to use the Latin and vocals without instrumentation, chanted, but not Gregorian. Kline then chose to see the variable portions of the structure of the mass, that is the propers that change with the day or season, as the place of greatest interpretation- in the propers he uses voice and strings, and draws on texts from not only Scripture but Samuel Becket and David Shapiro. and two shape note hymns Northport and Wondrous Love. In the John the Revelator Mass, Kline was able to see it’s spiritual structure and it’s creative elasticity found in living in the traditional mass by having the tradition as a whole be in dialogue with American and modernist music and poetry.

This is striking difference to what Gungor and the Liturgists seem to be doing. Liturgy and ritual are form them a generic category of worship and spirituality, and not a specific thing or tradition . So, they seek to mine what Christians in the past and current Christians do in their liturgies. The purpose of using litugy and mining liturgical traditions is to bring a cognizance of liturgy and ritual to evangelical worship and liturgy. So the larger tradition of the Church is utilized to offer and create “evangelical” liturgies. Gungor and the Liturgists aren’t looking at the liturgical tradition of the church as something to live in and find the creative and expansive place within its structures and patterns, rather those things are examples of what can be done. As such, they may bring pieces of that tradition into what they create or find inspiration from that tradition, but they have no interest in living there or adopting as their own that tradition. They don’t seek to inhabit liturgy (or liturgies), as Kline did, to find it’s creative possibilities.

My own Faith journey has come to lose interest in the possibilities of Christianity in general, or relgion in general, really anything in general. My own experience of evangelicalism (which was actually Lutheran Pietism and not American Fundamentalist or Revivalist) sent me into the catholic tradition of the church as found in Rome, Eastern Orthodoxy, and among the Anglicans. I’m not interested in forming the tradition to my sense of what contemporary Christianity needs or what a particular segment of American Protestant Christianity might learn from the tradition. Rather, I’m interested in being formed by the Tradition and finding the creative and inventive space of dialogue and invention within in it. This is what I think Kline did in the John the Revelator mass and it is what seems to be either uninteresting to the Liturgists or something they haven’t conceived of as possible. Either way, I’m looking for liturgies like John the Revelator and not Garden or Oh Light.

My Covenant Colleague Josef Rasheed‘s recent post about worship and cultural identity beautifully and gracefully articulates the role cultural expression plays in worship as well as its dynamic complexity. However, I am aware a white pastor saying some of the same things would come off very differently (this isn’t a complaint, there are very legitimate reasons why Whites can’t speak in exactly this way about heritage and cultural identity and worship). But I wish here to reflect on cultural identity, worship, and contemporaneity in dialogue with Rasheed’s post looking for that place of meeting he articulates so well in his conclusion, which I’d argue is beyond cultural identity or worship as expression, but union in Christ and the Body, the church.

Rasheed’s post has me asking what is my heritage (this is my word not Rasheed’s), what is my cultural identity? As White this question is full of pitfalls, traps, and possible wrong turns. Where as Rasheed’s cultural identity and heritage may be labyrinthine (he says it has taken many turns, and he has found it in unexpected moments) as White, for me to speak of cultural identity is mazelike. Taking a turn may not lead to the way out, can lead to dead ends. As White I can get lost in this talk of heritage and cultural identity. Claiming my cultural identify as Swedish or German can simply fall into the realm of facade and kitsch, or worse kitsch as hyper identity. Even this hand wringing over what is my cultural identity is one of those pitfalls: cultural identity, heritage, and the like are what those exotic others have, I’m just White, the default, the measure. In this pitfall we, who are without “cultural identity”, borrow, appreciate, and identify with what isn’t ours (this can happen in worship in multicultural congregations and worship). The flip side of that is to attempt to guard against all that isn’t White, to bewail the loss of this or that, that the youth are into other people’s music or culture, etc.

All of this is of course bound up in failing to recognize, at the outset, that part of the heritage of White and European is the oppression of people of color in the process of creating White identity. It should not be surprising that some of us take refuge in either the worship styles of “contemporary” or “traditional”(really what is familiar from our childhood).

What leads down some of these winding dead ends for Whites is to limit conversation of worship to that one hour (and for Whites it usually is exactly an hour) of worship on a Sunday morning. When Rasheed talks about worship expressions outside of the Sunday worship service, his example is the funeral. This resonates with me yet, I remember in seminary we were taught that we may need to insist to our (White) congregations that funerals were worship. If it is difficult to talk about worship and cultural identity as whites its in part because everything is so contained, things don’t bleed into each other. Either worship is an isolated thing with it’s own sets of rules and music and “culture” or it must be seamless with the current culture of the individuals who show up to the worship service.

Through my goth identity I have opted for what is contemporaneous, a cultural identity without heritage. Though Goth now has a history, and may be forming a tradition of sorts. I’ve never been one who felt the need for this my pop culture identity to be expressed in worship.

In college I often spent time with an Armenian friend’s family at Easter. There was food Middle Eastern and Mediterranean, a wonderful feast, and there was music. Armenian Apostolic services are chanted and there is no instrumentation, the music sung outside of church and the chant are quite different. Yet in the family celebration was continuous with the Divine Liturgy. The two celebrations were one, yet neither reflected nor reproduced the other. This resonated with me because I remembered such seamless but differentiated celebrations on the feast days in the Swedish Evangelical Covenant Church of my childhood. By the time I was in college that cultural expression of worship (of the congregation in which I, my mother, and grandfather had all been raised) was a memory. In the several thousand member church with multiple services and a contemporary worship service with rock band, worship was just another discrete thing I did in a week . Neither “traditional ” nor “contemporary” worship appealed to a “sub-culture” an identity I was forming around alternative and goth music. Whether we sang traditional hymns or the latest worship song neither were current expressions of my identity.

I have long been drawn to Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox worship. This began when at 8 and 9 when I encountered the Cathedrals of Europe as places of mystery and awe. Part of the draw is some worshipful connection to my Swedish and German cultural identity. Yet it is a bit complex, as it also alienates me from that cultural identity since most directly that identity is Lutheran and not Catholic. In some sense often what draws me in worship is a sense of deep historical and cultural connection, liturgies and songs passed down through European Christianity from the Mediterranean. Chant Gregorian and Eastern also relate to childhood encounter of the European cathedral. Though, I have difficulty except in a most vague and abstract way accounting for chant as an expression of my cultural identity. To some degree connecting to this ancient worship expression fits with family stories of immigration that also seek to keep some historical and familial memory of Sweden or Germany alive in the foreign context of the U.S.

Where does this meandering in the midst of worship, expression and cultural identity lead? In part Rasheed and I are talking about recognition and reception. Rasheed recognizes the Body of Chirst in people singing a hymn in the Bahamas in worship in the Congo: the recognition comes both in discovering something familiar in what was initially thought to be unfamiliar and in finding one’s place in what was simply unknown. In the cathedrals in Europe, in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox worship I too find familiarity in what seem unfamiliar and my place in what is unknown. Our recognitions are bound up in our cultural identities but not entirely accounted for by them: As Rasheed concluded “I was no longer American. They were no longer African. It is moments like these where the cultural expressions which are embedded in the soul of my people say Yes! We are God’s children, privileged to worship Him in Spirit and in Truth.”

In these various worship expressions reflective of various cultures we encounter more than our own or others cultural identity in recognizing and receiving that which forms us into the Body of Christ. One may say that another cultural identity is to be formed out of these cultural expressions. It is then possible that we may discern what forms us and does this work of formation, of knitting us into the living Temple, Christ’s body.

Here I’m brought back to all the pitfalls of saying these things as a White person. Whites have tended to assume that our way of doing things was God’s. Through White ideology Europeans ceased to be those gathered with others from other nations and people but those to whom others were gathered. When this heresy goes unrecognized it distorts the ability to recognize and receive, it undermines our ability to come to know the forms of the Body of Christ.

This is turning into the first in series of posts exploring worship, liturgy, culture and the roles of formation and expression in worship that forms us into the Body of Christ. There are two more posts in this unexpected and emerging series: here and here. The connection to these three posts isn’t at the moment self evident. In part the series is about linking these up. LEK 3/13/15

Recently it has come to light that Holly Hobby Lobby who posed in a photo with automatic riffle in one hand and the bible in the other, proclaiming her love of God, country, guns, and “family values,”had an adulterous affair with a video editor fo the Tea Party News. I’m not surprised. Not because I think all Tea Party members and conservatives are hypocrites but because this person’s Christianity is a remnant of common sort of Christianity in Christendom.

More to the point, I’m not surprised because Holly Hobby Lobby’s Christianity, at the height of Christendom, would have been seen by many (including my forebears) at most as a place to begin the call to conversion and repentance. We don’t often talk about how Christendom functioned to keep people in the orbit of the Church and Gospel (granted with other less positive effects). Without Christendom revivalist and pietist call to conversion would have been meaningless.

Excursus: “Church” is a tricky term, and discussions of this sort often fail to define the term. For the purposes of this post I’m combining a sacramental and pietist understanding of Church. Thus Church is both an entity, the Body of Christ, that transcends time and space and made up of the baptized as the body of Christ, and this body of Christ is best identified by those who are truly converted by and to Christ. And while were at it: I see “Christendom” as the cultural, societal and political space where the religion of Christianity is dominant and provides a cultural and political supportive environment for the Church. I see the case of Holly Hobby Lobby as a way to flesh out these two definitions in a time of post-Christendom.

Let me give an account of Church, Christianity and Christendom, from a pietist perspective, and specifically Lutheran pietism. In Lutheran Christendom, as in most forms of Christendom, the state made Christendom possible through making citizenship and being Christian equivalent. In Lutheran Christendom to be Christian was to be Lutheran. ( I know your hackles are all up, but lets let this be a lesson in history for now.) Pietists tell the story of the State sponsored Christianity as a dead Christianity. Pietism is in part a critique of dead dogma, and lifeless faith. As we tell it, Pietists came along and brought the vitality of the Gospel and encounter with God into dead Lutheran orthodoxy. What this early negative evaluation of Christendom doesn’t recognize is the ways in which Christendom and Christianity of Lutheran Orthodoxy and State church brought people into the orbit of conversion and encounter with Christ, which then the Pietists could offer. Pietism fails to recognize it’s own dependence upon Christendom. Because of Christendom (and that means also dead orthodoxy) Pietist didn’t have to explain who Jesus Christ was, nor who the God of Jesus Christ was and is. In the Lutheran state churches since to be a citizen was to be a Christian, one had to know the catechism, the creed, and Lords Prayer. We pietists, to use the tired phrase, brought head knowledge into the heart, but without Christendom, and the role of the state in making it’s citizens Christian, there would have been know mere “head” knowledge of the Gospel, God , and Christ.

Pietist and other revivalist Christian groups in Christendom assumed and made use of the common cultural religious assumptions of being Christian, and called conversion what was, from one point of view, simply a deepening the Christian commitment and faith of the Christian citizens of Christendom.

What happens then when the fabric of cultural assumptions of Christendom are in tatters or non-existent, and a certain group of Christians, and Christian leaders, still seek to claim that to truly be a citizen of a particular state, one should claim a Christian heritage? My answer is you get people like Holly Hobby Lobby, who through their own actions show they haven’t a clue what being a member of the Church is truly about, let alone what it would mean to follow Jesus Christ or to have the Mind of Christ, as we Pietists might say.

Granted in the United States Christendom was perpetuated and created through less overt political means. In the U.S. Christendom was the result of cooperation between various Christian groups that came to be understood as denominations. So, we still need to account for how we went from Revivalists and Pietists calling for deep commitment and conversion to Holly Hobby Lobby’s identity without conversion and change of being and mind. From the revivalist and “evangelical” view the culturally established and powerful denominations represented the domain of dead and nominal Christianity, as long as these “dead” denominations, the “mainline”, were willing to do the work of maintaining Christendom (if one wonders what I’m talking about a remnant of this reality is still found in the denominational affiliations of the United States Congress, and that oaths are still made upon the Bible).* As the dominant mainline denominations began to embrace a more secular and pluralist view of the U.S. slowly abandoning Christendom (most likely unwittingly, or so puzzlement over their loss of relevance indicates) Revivalist and Pietist denominations were gaining ascendancy and began to take up the mantle of preserving Christendom, that is America as a “Christian nation.” It’s not surprising then, that some members of these denominations would come to assume Christian identity as a heritage, and not as a break with the dead identity of the Christian citizen.

Revivalist and Pietist Christian language has now been put to use in shoring up Christendom. Strangely then conversion for some results in being passionately patriotic. Before the mainline abandoned Christendom, the revivalists and pietist could leave aside the question of Christian identity and American identity. We could call to conversion and new life in Christ, and such calls wouldn’t necessarily call into question ones American Citizenship nor even have to challenge patriotism. Christendom benefited from more vibrant faith as long as such a faith wasn’t too radical in questioning of the equivalence of citizen and Christian (we know such groups as the Anabaptist or the radical reformers, Mennonites, the Brethren and Society of Friends (Quakers) were seen as trouble makers.). However, the pietist faith didn’t need to couch itself in patriotic trappings, since cultural assumptions of the Christendom had that covered. If conversion led some to take up activism to correct the ills in society, well these reformers were working for a better Christians society that all tacitly agreed was a good thing (not to deny that these pietist and revivalist reformers were at times opposed, often by members and leaders of the “mainline”.)

Back to Holly Hobby Lobby: Such a form of Christianity comes out of a pietist and revivalist faith become guardian of Christendom. However, as such it is no different from the “dead faith” of Lutheran orthodoxy. My forbears would recognized it for what it is, at best the beginning, the spiritual space in which the call to conversion could take hold, at worst it is a dead, useless, and hypocritical faith. As such Such a Christianity can hardly be called faith, and can’t claim to know much if anything of the Mind of Christ or the Church.

* Also, I can’t recommend highly enough Martin E. Marty’s book Righteous Empire: the Protestant experience in America for one account of this reality before and during the Modernist/Fundamentalist split and before the Mainline abandoned Christendom to support a more pluralist and secularist societal fabric.

At the top of the David Bowie Is exhibition the Yohji Yamomoto black record body suit presents the wild spectacle of David Bowie. Then one moves to spend time in David Bowie’s early years, or really , the time before “David Bowie”. Here I got a sense of him as creative reclusive person, who through mime discovers his whole embodied self can be the basis of art as performance. David Bowie emerges out of a varied set of influences and a traditional performance art.

“David Bowie” in seeming contradiction to the spectacle isn’t about authenticity, or originality. David Bowie isn’t concerned about himself as the origin of his art. From the start he rejects the Rocker”s refusal of stage make up. The Rocker rejected make up as inauthentic. David Bowie picks it up like the early rockers, but doesn’t attempt to make it “authentic” or representing an original author. Rather, make up becomes part of an abyssal persona without originality. Make up is of course a key component to the Ziggy Stardust era along with wild costumes. In Ziggy Stardust we, also find the various ways in which Bowie, as a performance artist, borrows from all sorts of sources and in collaboration. He collaborates with designers for the costumes , on album art, and with studio musicians. Originality, authenticity is questioned and turned upside down, even as “David Bowie” leaves behind very creative and odd artifacts .

(We should not forget that David Bowie is a stage name and persona. A friend once met David Bowie in a book shop and she approached him and asked are you David Bowie? As he pulled down his shades, to reveal his eyes, he said to my friend, “Not today, love.”).

A portion of the David Bowie Is exhibit pauses in reflection upon Bowie’s 1979 appearance on Saturday Night Live. Behind the displayed costumes from that performance, in large lettering, a question is emblazoned: “David Bowie Revolutionary or Plagiarist?” That question raises the dilemma of our understanding of authenticity and originality. It also comes at a point in the exhibition after which Bowie’s originality is troubled by having seen how David Bowie is collaborative, and draws not only inspiration but whole tropes (conceptual and visual) form various works and art forms. Originality and authenticity is also troubled by Bowie’s system for conjuring of lyrics. The exhibition has already challenged notions of authorial originality and intention. So, one is prepared to see the question as a false dilemma. Yet I also think it articulates how we fail to grasp tradition and how it functions.

As wild as David Bowie is, my experience of him , as presented in David Bowie Is, was as a traditional artist and not avant guarde. Granted there is much in his performance that challenged convention and the status quo, but he is overtly and intentionally working with what he has received, and what others have abandoned and bringing what has been handed him into a place of freshness and newness. Part of what he receives as his career progress is “David Bowie” as a tradition to be mined. His own body of work becomes that which he receives and passes on to himself.

David Bowie fits within a tradition of entertainment, performance, art, and music. David Bowie is also his own Tradition.

It perhaps is strange to think of Bowie as an unoriginal , inauthentic, and traditional performance artist who has challenged the status quo and created a unique persona and set of personas. This is strange because we think that challenging the status quo occurs out of a place of authenticity and originality. We see tradition as only a conservative and static impulse. Yet, if we see tradition as a dynamic moment of receptivity and creativity, then we can begin to look at the self-contradictory aspect of originality and authenticity:

Can any of us claim to be our own origin? can any of us be ourselves without dependence upon or reference to anything nor anyone else? Don’t we all receive ourselves from others? Authenticity as originating only in the self and through independence consumes itself in an impossibility.

Bowie refuses the obsession with authenticity, embracing artifice and persona. In so doing he puts himself in a place to receive a tradition of performance art that he then uses to create an astounding body of work. In the body of work of “David Bowie” one doesn’t find the true authentic artist of an original body of work. Rather one finds a body of work in conversation with a tradition of music and performance art (mime, fashion, theater, film, music), and a body of work that becomes its own tradition that is received and passed on.

David Bowie’s artistic body of work is overwhelming, shocking, wild, and creative, but it isn’t original. The career and body of work received under the name “David Bowie” is possibly one of the best illustration of Jesus’ aphorism from the Gospel of Matthew: “The Scribes of the Kingdom are like one who brings out from the treasury what is both old and new.” Such is what it means to be in a tradition, to have received a treasure out of which one brings both the old and the new. Such is the body of work of David Bowie.

Granted David Bowie’s tradition isn’t a religious tradition but of performance, art, and music, and of “David Bowie” himself. In this body of work we find what is both new and old, revolution and plagiarism. What we don’t find is an authentic original author, David Bowie. Such a singular and authentic origin doesn’t exist. Or rather the origin and authenticity of David Bowie is found in others from whom he received what makes up “David Bowie.”

Yesterday was the feast of the Epiphany. In the west this feast is the celebration of the arrival of the Magi and their adoration of the infant Jesus of Nazareth presenting him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. In the east the Epiphany is the feast of the baptism of Christ in the river Jordan, the above icon is the icon of the Epiphany or Theophany.

The icon is rich. In the lower portions of the icon in the water are the depictions of spirit manifestations of water, the figure with the wings and wild hair and a beard represents the Jordan river. on the other side is Leviathan, these are the spirits the personifications of water. Christ’s hand of blessing is not raised as in of the icons but is in the water, blessing the water.

Jesus stands in a way reminiscent of the crucifixion

Processional cross, Egg Tempera and gold leaf

feet and legs together, dressed only in a loin cloth.

John the Forerunner’s preaching is represented by an ax laying against a bush, “…the ax is at the root…”

It is also, not surprisingly, a Trinitarian icon. At the top God the Father, un-circumscribed of whom we can’t make any image, unknown but by the Son and the Spirit, is represented by the semi circle of blues and black. The Spirit represented as the Gospels describe descending on Jesus of Nazareth as it is revealed (epiphany) that this human is God the Son.

And Angels Attend, (indicating Jesus Christ’s temptation in the desert, after which the Gospels say he was attended by angels.).

I painted this icon as a medallion, in part to strengthen the sense that God in Jesus Christ comes for the whole earth and all of creation, represented by the river and its spirit manifestations in the painting. The extent of the realty hear represented is particular and universal, cosmic. Salvation, Reconciliation, Liberation, is in this material world, in (re)connecting matter the created world with its source, the very Life of the world. A great estrangement took place and God the Son, as Jesus of Nazareth comes, and we can see God, and find our true life, the life of the whole cosmos. God is now forever part of the matter in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

This radical act of God, is the very thing that makes possible the painting of icons. If God had not become flesh and a human in the Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, God would have remained beyond us.

A friend of mine in a Facebook post comment thread mentioned that the Christmas story is often told as a children’s story. I think there are several layers to this characterization. One the Holy Nativity is often seen as a cute and comforting story, a G movie safe for the viewing pleasure of the entire family. Secondly, as a cute, safe and comforting story it takes on the character traits of the Disney fairy tale (in contrast to the Brother’s Grimm fairy tales). Lastly the Christmas story is often simply kitsch, as most nativity sets for sale in Christmas isles clearly demonstrates. The above is all part of the celebration of Christmas that knows nothing of the season of Advent.

Here, and at the Oratory of Jesus Christ, Reconicler, I took up reflecting on the season of Advent as a time to stay woke. But what now in this twelve day season of Christmas (yes Christmas day is simply the first day of Christmas, we have Christmas all the way until January 5th.)? The seasons of Advent and Christmas are seasons of the Holy Nativity, God’s revelation in and through a the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. As such can we see the Holy Nativity not as some comfortable story but something that stirs something in us, even something that disturbs us from slumber?

I think so and I think the Icon of the Holy Nativity is more helpful in this than the typical nativity set one can buy on the Christmas shelves in stores.

Take some time to reflect on this icon and it’s meaning: at its center is Mary and the baby Jesus in the manger. If you are familiar with iconography, the cave and the manger should remind one of icons of the empty tomb, the manger is a sarcophagus the cave a tomb. Also, Mary is lying down, she has after all just given birth. In one corner two midwives are washing the baby Jesus. These midwives not mentioned in the Gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus, are part of a type of realism, there surely were midwives, but also hearken back to the story of Moses. Midwives are an important part of the story of liberation and salvation. And Jesus is not only a second Adam but also a second Moses, come to deliver God’s people. In the other corner sits Saint Joseph, in conversation with an old shepherd, or is it the shepherd who is attempting to draw Joseph out. This is a great deal to take in. Joseph, perhaps has his doubts about what all this means. How is it that the messiah is born in such rough conditions and greeted by such rough persons. Does God reveal God’s self in such common rough and uncouth ways? But then Above Joseph are the Magi traveling following the sign in the heavens. These are men with power and wealth, but they aren’t Isrealites and Children of Abraham. One may look at this icon and simply see confusion. The whole story here depicted in form and color may not make much sense. How is this a holy image. How in such common place things, midwives at work, a feeding trough and Mary and Joseph silent puzzled without answers, a depiction of a holy and revelatory event.

Can it truly be that this even changes everything. That God is found not only in this crazy story, but in that little infant born so long ago, Jesus of Nazareth. Is this how liberation comes? Does this shock and disturb? Perhaps it should. In this infant God dwelt in our midst and is now united with the entire cosmos.

But the story of Christmas and it’s celebration doesn’t end here: the next three days we in Celebrating God’s revelation in coming as a little child, we mark the first martyr, Saint Stephen, remember the Evangelist Saint John the Apostle, and Herod’s massacre of the infants in Bethlehem, the Holy Innocents. If you haven’t guessed this isn’t a children’s story, nor Disney Fairy tale. This is a celebration and a story that isn’t afraid to face the worst humanity can offer. It certainly is a match for facing our countries continuing struggle with the Racism that has been woven into the very fabric of its history and policies. It’s also a story and an icon that can encompass our questions, doubts, confusion and despair, and say at the same time God has come, liberation, justice and revelation have come in the midst of all this horror and confusion.

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence–
as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil– to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence! (Isaiah 64:1, 2)

This cry for God to act from the lectionary for the First Sunday of Advent seems very fitting. Calling on god to tear open the heavens. Tear down the barrier between heaven and earth that keeps the kingdom from coming and God’s will from being done on earth as it is in heaven.

But what if this has happened? What if the heavens were torn open and God has come down? (As depicted in these iconic depictions of the heaven opening.) In Advent what we wait for, what we are awake to is that God has come in the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth.

The tearing of the heavens and God coming with justice happened. It happened in a very strange and nearly imperceptible way. The nations, the powers, have been shaken. Yet, we can be unaware, live as though all is lost. Admittedly, in times like these, it doesn’t seem like this story has much relevance or meaning. If true what good has it done for those who continue to suffer injustice, oppression, and death.

Isaiah, a few verses below the words above, wonders why God doesn’t act as in the time of Egypt , when God delivered Israel from the oppression of Pharaoh and Egypt, the empire and power of the day. But think with me on that story:

Did Israel’s freedom from enslavement and oppression at the hands of the state power and government come because Pharaoh gradually made reforms and improved the conditions of the Hebrews? Did the justice Isaiah recalls and longs for come from Pharaoh, or even with Pharaoh’s help and co-öperation? No, it was wrested from pharaoh by God.

But in that wresting from Pharaoh the freedom of the Hebrews, God remained apart from humanity and creation in that moment of liberation. God crushes the power of oppression, destroying its ability to exact its legal penalties, and it’s justice. It was fearsome and violent, and at Mount Sinai the Israelites weren’t so sure what to make of all this shaking.

Now, when we speak of God’s advent, we are no longer speaking of the shock and awe that Isaiah is longing for in the tearing open of the heavens and God coming down. Yet, even so the heavens have been torn open and God has come down.

It is worth noting that this didn’t happen only once: God tore open the heavens in the incarnation, and then again as the Spirit came upon those followers of Jesus, to form the Church, on Pentecost.

Even so, none of this has brought a permanent end to injustice. The heavens have been torn open and God descends… and then what… disappears?

Christians, (perhaps even the Church), are, and have been as much a part of oppression and injustice as working for liberation and justice.

There are questions… is something awakening?

We wait in darkness with not much light. This is Advent and a place of deep longing.

For now lets sit with heavens torn open and God come down, but seemingly little shaken, and ask what is the source of justice and liberation? What are we looking for, and who are we looking towards to provide it?

I’ve kept mostly silent about the grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown. On Social media I’ve attempted to direct people’s attention to Black and other voices from the margins around what happened and the continued unrest in the wake of the announcement of the grand jury’s decision.

In terms of white voices this post by Geoff Holsclaw is a good response from a position of privilege that is seeking to be open to move beyond privilege.

As the strange juxtaposition of the lit sign of Seasons Greetings and heavily armored police showed we are in the Holiday season that begins with Thanksgiving. I’ve never particularly seen Thanksgiving as a religious holiday, and the attempts to make it a Christian Holiday have always struck me (even as a child) as strange. As a child it was one of the few Holidays that my family celebrated that was really just about family. Christmas and Easter were times for family to gather but they were first feasts of the Church. It’s not that God was absent from the celebration, but I don’t remember ever attending a worship service on or around Thanksgiving. My Grandmother (on my mother’s side) was the daughter of a Swedish immigrants, My Grandfather (mother’s father )second generation Swedish American. My father was a naturalized citizen of the United States, his family were refugees and displaced persons after World War II (a story for another post). As immigrants who had been able to assimilate into White America we were genuinely thankful for the life we were able to lead in the U.S. As for me as a child the story of Thanksgiving never really touched me. It’s problematic and racist themes eventually came to mean that mostly Thanksgiving is an excuse and a means to see my family.

I say all this to draw attention to what looms on the horizon on Thanksgiving if one keeps the liturgical calendar of the Church: Advent. The transition between Thanksgiving and Advent always felt abrupt and jolting. The pallid whitewashed soporific mythology of the Pilgrims was in stark contrast to the jarring scriptures of wakefulness and prophetic words anticipating God’s justice come in human flesh. At Thanksgiving we were full and thankful, on the First Sunday in Advent we were in the dark, empty waiting for fulfillment. Hopeful, yet aware of things being out of whack. In Advent we were called to admit our failings and await God’s loving answer to our violence and hatred. Thanksgiving pretended all was as it should be. Advent said we were still waiting, but the dawning transformation of the world was on its way. In Advent we were to hunger for the righteous reign of God.

Clearly, the shooting of Michael Brown and now with the failure of a grand jury to indict Daren Wilson has jarred us from the whitewashed and soporific mythology of America that continues to be told on Thanksgiving. Many of course want things to just calm down to not look at the reality that the system of America is and always has been racist, that since I’m deemed white I have privileges that people of color and certain blacks continue to not have.

We’ve had an Advent moment come before Thanksgiving, don’t be lulled back to sleep, Stay woke. Being awake isn’t easy. To open your eyes to the world and the systems we inhabit. This Thanksgiving to be awake probably means to lament, to grieve and to confess. Sure there are also reasons to be thankful, but I doubt it is for the reasons that the Thanksgiving mythology wishes us to believe, and the source of that goodness isn’t from the god of the altar at which we are to burn the incense of our thanksgiving. But then as a member of the body of Christ our Thanksgiving (Eucharist) isn’t the founding of another principality of the world but in one crucified by the systems of the world. And this crucified one says wake up, stay awake.

Last week Drescher in The Narthex analyzed the recent GTS conflict and possible resolution in terms of social media, its use by the GTS8 and the possible implications for denominational power dynamics and ecclesiology. The way the conflict has played out certainly has a great deal to do with social media and how the GTS8 used it. It is worth reflecting on the ways this would have played out differently before social media. Had this happened 10 to 15 years ago I probably would have read about the conflict, if I would have known about it at all, in the Christian Century of Christianity Today. As I’ve sat with Drescher´s article I’ve come to think my difficulties with the piece that I briefly outlined here, are clarified by my asking what’s at stake in her ecclesiological claims for social media.

If I’m reading Drescher correctly what is at stake is the possibility of a more just and truly ecclesiological functioning of the church ( read denominations?), made possible by an embrace of social media. Or more to the point, what’s at stake for Drescher is that social media offers a way to truly fulfill the priesthood of all believers, in a rewiring of the church. What follows is my beginning to reflect upon the possible effects social media might have on the church and what that may or may not mean for our ecclesiology.

A side note to my reflection here: I’m not sure that the case study of the GTS8 shows social media put to use in a way that exemplifies the priesthood of all believers or even one where the powerless through social media have made the powerful hear them. While professors and priests are seeing their positions of privilege and power decreasing in the society, still to be professors and clergy professors in what is essentially the Episcopal seminary, makes this case study more about two powerful factions within the Episcopal church. Thus, I don’t see this as a conflict between the high-handed magisterial institutional and those without access to this magisterial institution, rather this is a conflict within the magisterial institution itself. Granted the GTS8 stood to lose their standing within the institution and unjustly. However, even without social media I’m certain (but willing to be corrected) that the GTS8 would have in the least had the ear of members of the magisterial institution, and would have had this ear because they walk quite freely in these halls of power.

The above quibble though shouldn’t ignore Drescher’s experience that social media drew in those who had no immediate connection with any of those in the debacle and that social media makes things public that at another time could have easily been and probably would have remained behind closed doors. In short what Drescher is pointing out is that social media fosters networking, wider participation, and truth-telling.

That social media fosters networking and quick transmission of information about events and situations as they develop this can draw people into action and participation, but it seems to me it also (even in my engagement in social media) encourage and fosters by-standing, the rapidity of information can overwhelm and make it difficult to know what or how to act or even know if action is the correct response. Some of Drescher’s positive claims about truth-telling and social media work mainly (it seems to me) when the sufferer of injustice is able to harness social media adeptly and those in power or the oppressor either doesn’t make use of social media or is inept at harnessing the social technology. It becomes no easier to discern and know what is going on nor how to interpret the flurry of claim and counter-claim when all parties are able to use social media equally well. Also, social media can be used by anyone for the pursuit of their ends and can do so effectively. (e.g. One could argue that social media was used expertly to turn back a just decision by the board of World Vision concerning their gay employees.)

The shift I see isn’t necessarily towards the priesthood of all believers, though the connectivity of social media and it’s flattening effect may be harnessed in that direction, rather there is a shift in power based on who can best use the new technology. This technology makes it possible to rapidly harness a wide-ranging network of people that with the old technology took much longer to build and required institutions like denominations to keep up and grow those networks. With Social Media these can rise up (and just as quickly disappear as Drescher’s article tacitly recognizes), and it is more likely that those not at the centers of the old way of doing things are more comfortable with these new techniques of social organizing. The shift then is towards those who are comfortable with and have access to social media.

Ecclsiologically this new technology we call social media shows us that the old social technologies weren’t the church, but technological means to organize and divide (lets be honest, or perhaps more aptly to organize by dividing) Christians (and thus the church). Thus, social media does challenge the denominations attempt to claim exclusively “church” and “body of Christ”. The old means of organizing weren’t unequivocally the church.

So, we should be very hesitant to claim that those who adeptly make use of social media are somehow incarnating the truer ecclesiology, because like all technologies social media isn’t unequivocal. Whether the church in her essence is seen as a priesthood of all believers or as a holy ordering of bishop, priest, deacon, and people (though these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive ), social media can be harnessed for the living out our life together, and it may reveal some aspects of the church that have been neglected or hidden. However, it is the human heart and an openness to the transforming work of the Holy Spirit that determines whether these means of organizing ourselves will be consistent with transforming work of the reign of God. Certainly social media has peculiar ways it can connect with this transforming work, but in our use of the technology we can undermine that possibility, just as our use of the old technologies undermined said possibilities.